Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC (1TB) Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

On the speed front, portable hard drives have been decisively surpassed by solid-state storage, in the form of external SSDs or even USB 3.0-interface thumb drives with fast flash memory inside.

That has left hard drive makers, for the most part, competing on price while occasionally adding larger-capacity options, like Seagate did with its recently-unveiled 4TB Backup Plus Portable drive. (We have a review of that single-drive model in the works.) With many 1TB drives now slipping down, down, down in price, close to the $50 price point, and performance between competing drives becoming quite similar (compared to solid-state options, at least), spacious portable storage has in large part become a commodity. In other words, people tend to buy what’s on sale, or choose a drive from a brand they trust.

For that reason, Buffalo’s MiniStation Extreme NFC piqued our interest when we first heard about it: It's different in a market of me-toos. The drive’s features stand out thanks, in part, to military-class shock protection (rated to withstand drops up to 1.2 meters), IPX3 water resistance (proof against spraying water for five minutes' duration), and IP5X5 dust resistance (preventing dust from interfering with the drive’s operation).

While those features make the MiniStation Extreme NFC larger than standard portable drives from Seagate and Western Digital, Buffalo’s drive also includes a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip inside that can be used to encrypt/decrypt the drive without the need to enter a password. (It uses 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption.) According to the documentation, you can unlock the drive using an included NFC-equipped smartcard or with "a compatible mobile device." But as we discovered in testing (and after reaching out to Buffalo for an explanation), the NFC chips in most smartphones in the United States don’t work with this drive.

That limits the convenience of the MiniStation Extreme NFC for buyers who, attracted by the "NFC" designation, may have been looking use their smartphones to unlock this drive. Most will have to stick to using the included NFC-equipped smartcard instead, an item that all too easily could be lost.

We did find that a reasonable-enough solution was just to leave the smartcard in our wallet. That way, we wouldn’t lose it, and unlocking the drive was as easy as dropping the wallet on top of the drive. For those worried about this approach making data less secure (you're carrying the lock and the key wherever you go), you can opt to require both a password and the smartcard to unlock the drive.

That's a fair solution, but given the price of this Buffalo drive, make sure you really need the NFC/lockdown features, because you do pay a major premium for them. Ordinary 1TB or 2TB drives, or even "just" ruggedized ones, are easy to find for much less money.

Design & Features

At 0.8x3.5x5.6 inches, the Buffalo drive is definitely bulky, as modern portable hard drives go. By comparison, the 1TB Western Digital My Passport Slim is under half an inch thick, more than an inch shorter, and weighs less than half of the Buffalo drive’s 10.6 ounces. But while the MiniStation Extreme NFC won’t slip into a pocket as easily as other drives will, it’s still compact and light enough to fit in an everyday carry bag.

The Buffalo drive’s extra bulk, though, should make it better suited to withstanding drops, as well as exposure to dust and dampness, as we noted above. The internal drive is housed in multiple layers of protective rubber, metal, and plastic, as you can see in the Buffalo-provided schematic below...

That being said, the external plastic shell, complete with a seam along the upper section, doesn’t look or feel as nice as other drives we’ve looked at recently, including metal-clad drives like the My Passport Slim and the super-svelte Seagate Seven drive.

The Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC is also quite expensive in a cost-per-gigabyte sense if you don’t need the rugged design or NFC functionality. Terabyte portable drives can be found online for at or just above $50. The 1TB MiniStation Extreme, however, was selling for around $130 at many retailers at this writing, right at its MSRP of $129.99. Newegg.com had it at $133; the same site was also offering the 2TB model for $215. There is no higher-capacity option; if you need more storage, you’ll have to opt for non-ruggedized drives from Seagate or Western Digital, or a dual-drive solution like LaCie’s Rugged RAID. That latter option will set you back a hefty $399 for 4TB of storage.

Versions of this Buffalo drive are also available without the NFC functionality for as low as $99 for the 1TB model. Given the lack of mobile-device support for the NFC feature in the United States, many buyers looking for a ruggedized drive but not necessarily the NFC functionality should probably opt for that version instead, or consider another rugged solution, such as the much cheaper ADATA HD710A, which is also waterproof.

The Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC has a permanently attached USB 3.0 cable that wraps around two sides of the drive and tucks nicely in the side when not in use. The cable is fairly short, at about 6 inches long, including the USB connector. For situations in which that is not long enough, Buffalo includes an extension cable, roughly 20 inches long, in the box as well.

Software

To use the NFC functionality with the drive, you’ll first have to install Buffalo's ModeChanger software that comes on the drive. (It is Mac- and PC-compatible.) You’ll need to run that once and opt to set up the drive for encryption, which, in the process, will wipe whatever data is on the drive. As a result, be sure to move the manuals and other software off the drive first, if you want to use them later (although they are also available online from this spot on Buffalo's Web site.)

Next, you’ll be prompted to choose whether you want to use only a password to decrypt the drive, only a smartcard "or a compatible mobile device," both of these options, or one or the other...

If you choose to use an NFC device, either as an option or a necessity, you’ll next be prompted to place your NFC smartcard or mobile device on top of the drive to register it with the MiniStation Extreme NFC. When we tried to do this with a number of devices, however, including our Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone and a Google Nexus 7 (2013) tablet, we were greeted by the following error message...

After several failed attempts to get any of our NFC-equipped mobile devices to work with the Buffalo drive, we reached out to the company for clarification and were told the following: “The NFC capability is limited to the included NFC card for users in the U.S. because the drive doesn’t support unlocking from NFC-enabled smartphones currently available in North America. However, certain NFC-enabled smartphones outside of North America can be used to unlock the device.”

We asked for a list of mobile devices that do work with the drive’s built-in NFC tech, but as of the time of this writing in mid-July 2015, we hadn’t received a response.

To be fair, the drive’s box doesn’t promise the ability to use NFC-equipped mobile devices to unlock the drive, but the drive’s documentation does. This is somewhat disappointing, as we really liked the idea of dropping a smartphone (which is generally always at hand) on top of the drive to unlock it without having to enter a password (or requiring both for added security).

We did discover, though, that it’s almost as convenient to put the included smartcard (which does work flawlessly to unlock the drive) in our wallet. That allowed us to simply take out our wallet and place it on the drive for easy unlocking. We’d recommend keeping the smartcard in your wallet, though, as only one is included in the box, and it could be misplaced easily. An alternative, if you have a folio-style smartphone case, might be to keep it tucked in there like any other ID card.

Once the drive is encrypted, it will show up as a 195MB drive when initially plugged in, and you’ll have to double-click the OPEN_HS utility, then place the smartcard near the drive or type in your password (or both, depending on how you set it up) to access files you’ve stored on the drive.

Buffalo also includes a simple (and simply titled) Backup Utility program. It lets you choose to back up either whole drives or specific folders to the MiniStation Extreme NFC.

You can also schedule how often and at what times of day you want backups to occur.

For basic needs on Windows PCs, this program should suffice, but you can find better free options, including EaseUS’ ToDo Backup Free, which is free for personal use. That program packs more features, and it allows for full-drive drive cloning and restoration, both of them important to have to get your system back up and running after a drive failure.